After about 5 hours of play, I ended up referring to a help guide to assist me in the game. As the game progresses the difficulty only ramps up with later puzzles requiring even more thought out steps. Solutions to some puzzles may come hours after you first stumble across them, while you have been busy dealing with other problems.

There is an option to turn on clue’s which just highlights objects you can interact with and for me, this option needed to be on all the time. I can’t count how many times I missed 1 teeny tiny thing that just stopped me in my tracks for way longer than I care to admit. Obduction can be maddeningly frustrating at times as the solution to whatever you are trying to puzzle out may not be readily apparent. You’ll interact with some projections, which are real-world recordings of actors put in a 2D space, which I thought was a nice unique touch, and the actors in question do a great a job with their characters. Silence pervades the game, but well-timed music hammers home the intensity of the situation you may be facing or adding an extra sense of elation as you discover a new area. Ambient effects like wind, a flowing waterfall or trickling streams all sound amazing. Make sure you have a pair of headphones if you do play because the 3D audio may be some of the best I have heard in awhile. Due to the teleportation at play, textures fade in before you as the game struggles to keep up with your movements and when combined with that pop-up loading screen, it just makes for a frustrating experience. Unfortunately, none of the game looks optimised for the PSVR headset making close objects very blurry and further away ones just distant blobs. The game is loaded with detail and is one of the most beautiful games I have seen in recent memory…out of VR. Almost everything in Obduction is a washed out hard to look at. I can’t help but compare the crisp and clean non-VR visuals to the mess that lies behind the headset. The already low resolution gets reduced further when you enter the cart making these sections some of the most ugly I have ever seen In VR. The blinders in Obduction are the most intrusive I have ever seen VR easily cutting off half the viewable area, if not more, even if the cart is at a stop. An important aspect to Obduction is driving the mine-cart with a mounted laser on it, which you need to drive around and solve puzzles, unfortunately when in the cart, blinders kick in, limiting your viewing area…a lot. You will be required to push and pull levers, press buttons, check out a host of objects and discover clues to solve whatever you are working on. It’s way easier to view items in VR thanks to being able to manipulate items with your hands. With either control method you get a tracked in-game hand (or 2) and can grab and interact with items scattered around the environment. I could live with the limited movement scheme in VR, it’s not like I haven’t played a ton of similar titles but moving around the map may cause a quick load screen to pop up when you teleport, whether you travel far or short distances, doubling down on just how cumbersome movement is here. I’m not a fan of constraining VR players to these limitations but considering that the flat version of this game has full freedom of movement, the lack of it in VR is glaring. Whether you use the DS4 or Move controllers, teleport and click-turning are the only options available.

Well, it’s here now and while the entire game is playable in or out of the headset I feel like most may be disappointed by what’s offered in VR. We saw Obduction arrive on the PS4 8 months ago and many have been waiting impatiently for the VR patch promised soon after the games launch. The campaign is supposed to take anywhere from 5 to 15 hours and unless you are using a guide or are some kind of genius, it’s going to take you way longer than 5 hours. It’s engrossing and so satisfying when you figure out the next piece of this seemingly never-ending puzzle. The environments are fully realized, and the puzzles are some of the most complicated I have ever played through. You are left to your own devices and need to figure out not only why you ended up in this strange world, but the events leading up to your arrival. Out of VR, Obduction is great! It plays like a traditional first-person exploration title with a very heavy emphasis on puzzle solving.

Obduction vr